Back from hunt

[sylvanstargazer]

A longer post will follow with more of my hunt experiences, but first, before I forget it all, I want to share a minor *cough* frustration I encountered.

Comments

[okosut]

I'm one of the authors of this puzzle. I can't imagine I can say anything that will prevent you from hating me forever, but I'm extremely sorry you got so frustrated working on it. The red herrings you found are truly astonishing, though, and I do kind of wish we'd written the puzzle you describe (though I'm sure our editors would have rejected it because it sounds too constrained to be writable).

All in all, I have no idea why we were supposed to prefer "ALLINCLAPC" to "ALLIN" which followed the pattern established up to that point

Basically, there wasn't a good reason. What we were thinking was that generally siteswaps are cyclical; for example when you juggle 441 you generally do 441441441441... So if you juggling ocarina, grail, illogic, conceit, and catnip in 75364 and repeat the pattern, you'll get ALLINCLAPCALLINCLAPCALLINCLAPC, so the exact start position doesn't matter. The problem is that the siteswaps in the rest of the puzzle aren't cyclical, so as a solver you're not necessarily thinking about it that way. Originally we were going to have the sequence of numbers be a cycle as well. In fact, the set of objects that are being juggled are already designed for this, and all you have to do is replace the cauliflower with "catnip", and everything else works and the sequence cycles. The problem with that was that you don't know that you should start at the 7 in the siteswap and not somewhere else. If you interpret the pattern as 64753, you get the string INALLPCCLA.

Much too late, we realized that the answer to this puzzle should have been UPKEEP (which ended up going to Letter Bank). Not only would that have been more thematic than CLAP, but we could have had a length-6 siteswap that gave the string ANSWERUPKEEP. Then we could have had a full cycle of objects, and it would be easy to deduce that you should start the pattern in the position to get ANSWER, and then if you continue it, which is clued by the cycle, you get UPKEEP, which you would hopefully not mistake for garbage letters. But, this would have meant rewriting almost the whole puzzle from scratch, including filming 6 new videos, and we just didn't have time for that.